Call for Chapter Authors: "Everything Wrong with the Presidents"

Hello all, I'm writing to you in hopes that many of you will join me and a growing list of authors for the latest Cato Institute book project, Everything Wrong with the Presidents (https://www.libertarianism.org/everything-wrong-presidents). We launched this project last month and are gradually expanding our search for authors to keep the contributions coming. Our goal is to produce one chapter for each presidential administration, written by period specialists, focusing exclusively on the undoubtedly long lists of every single thing that president did wrong while in office. Plenty of books on the presidents (nearly all of them!) spend most of their time justifying or explaining away a president's faults and even their serious moral failings, often under the impression that it is more important to protect the 'integrity of the office' than it is to tell the unvarnished (and often very nasty) truth. For the space of this humble volume, then, we want readers to really sit with the uncomfortable fact that all American presidents have had massive problems--and that perhaps the office itself actually is the problem.

If you do have any interest in participating, please be sure to contact me ASAP with your top three choices of president, a CV, and an idea for your writing timetable. Contributions will be published on a rolling basis at www.libertarianism.org and authors will be paid at roughly double our usual columnist rate for their chapters. During the final days of the 2020 election, we will be compiling all the chapters into a book volume for release as near as possible to inauguration day, 2021. Chapters should be no fewer than 1,500 words and no more than 5,000. Of course, some presidents will require much more writing than others--no matter what ideological point of view you might bring to your critique--but our preference will always be toward brevity. I should also say that while we imagine that most authors who sign up with this project will be libertarian-oriented in some way, we are in no respect making this a requirement. In fact, we expect all authors to present a wide and varied set of critiques so all readers in all audiences will have the fullest picture possible of everything wrong with the presidents.